General Swarm update

[Nelson Minar]

Hello! It's been awhile since you've heard from the Swarm developers:
we've been madly working away on designing Swarm and writing code.
Things are progressing nicely. We now have a few sample applications
and our first alpha test project running, and are continuing to code
to meet our target June 1 beta release.


We have a new set of Swarm web pages with new papers and pictures from
our demos. Please visit <URL:http://www.santafe.edu/projects/swarm/>. 
Also, the Swarm mailing lists now are being maintained by the
Majordomo software: for mailing list requests, send mail to
<address@hidden> with the one line body "help".


In December we finally reached the stage where we think we understand
the design of Swarm, enough to implement a running version with
concurrent schedules, multi-layer simulations, good data collection,
and most importantly, an easy interface for the Swarm application
developer.

Since then we've been implementing parts of Swarm, both the kernel and
the exterior libraries. The software is now complete enough to begin
to give demos, starting with heatbugs, mousetrap, and market, albeit
with some hacked in code. More information on these sample
applications is on our Web pages. We gave two well-recieved demos in
the beginning of March, and have begun giving out the code to selected
alpha testers in order to get feedback.

Our next major deadline is June 1, when we hope to have a beta version
of Swarm ready for general testing. If the beta test period goes well
we will have an official Swarm 1.0 release at the end of the summer.